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Back during your CES 2012 coverage in January you reported on one of the initial planned external expansion boxes, the MSI GUS II. Things like that (I know there are a few others now) seem to be where the story gets truly interesting for mobile users IMO. Even though the bandwidth available is only equivalent to a few lanes, testing like HardOCP's 480 x16 vs x4 article indicates that at single screen resolutions (ie., no more then 2560x1600) graphics cards can perform shockingly well even with severely restricted bandwidth. So more then merely having a hub there's the potential of being able to plug an ultrabook into a hub and have a mid-range full GPU ready to go, along with a screen and other ports. If it all goes smoothly it could really expand the desirability of ultrabooks even farther, making them more and more no-compromise, although it'll probably take the next-gen 40/100 Gbps TB standard to push it farther or handle GPGPU applications. Still exciting stuff.Reply

Sadly, the MSI GUS II is not that useful due to only supporting bus power (75W, no external power connectors supported). The fastest (nVidia) card it can support is the GT 640, which isn't that much faster than the integrated graphics it would be intended to replace. Anything faster can't be bus-powered.

It would give you a small graphics upgrade over the Ivy Bridge integrated graphics, but not a big enough one to warrant all the cost and effort... and a notebook with discrete graphics could easily outperform it.

If they add support for externally powered GPUs (anything that draws over 75W), then it could be something special.Reply

If they add support for externally powered GPUs (anything that draws over 75W), then it could be something special.

That's extremely trivial though, I was only using it as an Anandtech featured example of one initial expansion, not as the ideal solution itself. Not exactly a big deal to stick a tiny external power source in there, in fact it's odd MSI didn't do it in the first place (or who knows, maybe it'll get revised before release), but as the chips themselves become cheaper and get plenty of supply it seems likely other solutions will appear. It feels like one of the real possible killer apps for the interface after all, something that can't be easily replicated through other means.Reply

they are (villagetronic+others in the egpu community) working on a thunderbolt system..supposedly development support is limited to large partners though because the thunderbolt team at intel is overworked? someday it'll come out, external gpu solutions on >x1 PCIe2.0 connections, that is. the power issue is somewhat of a nonissue if you don't mind bringing around any sort of 12v psu, be it normal atx, sfx, or w/e and just hooking it upReply

I also have heard it has been reported there is no 6 pin power thus the device can only do 75w.

If the device can do 150w you can put a 7850 in there, or possibly a gtx 660 (the gtx660 is a personal guess since the gtx 670 tdp was 170w and to do the gpu boost on the gtx 670 the tdp has to be 141w.)Reply

Thing is though, even more important than power. Is the technology bandwidth.

10 Gbps (one-direction ) really is not that much in the way of graphics card bandwidth. As I recall. a 7600GT from a few years back, could chew through about 20Gbyte /s under intensive situations. So 10 Gbit/s is hardly going to put a dent into that. So with that in mind, we're basically stuck with integrated graphics performance again.

That is, at least until the next iteration of the technology. Maybe.

Still, from a modular system approach, I like the idea. However I doubt it would be practical any time soon ( like you pretty much already said ).Reply

No idea where you're getting these metrics from? PCIe 3.0 x16 is 16GB/s so there's no way a 7600GT could have used that much bandwidth. maybe you're referring to the internal memory bandwidth?? It has been proven that an x4 2.0 connection is sufficient for about ~80-90% of the performance of an x16 link in many gaming situationsReply

" It has been proven that an x4 2.0 connection is sufficient for about ~80-90% of the performance of an x16 link in many gaming situations"

You would be very lucky to see half that. It is very likely, that you would see 25% or less of that.

People have been working on this problem for years now. Through other means. Partially, they have succeeded, using the MXM laptop graphics connection. At a cost that begs to wonder why they did not just buy a $2000 laptop to begin with.

You can buy an external graphics enclosure, for laptops, right now. If you're willing to spend ~$800 for it. Then, only if you have the right laptop.

So in ending I will say this. You're dreaming. You're dreaming a dream I have had myself. At some point however, you're going to have to come back to reality.

Oh, one last thing. I should point out that Gigabytes, and Gigabits are not universal with one another. 10 Gigabit == 1.25 Gigabyte. That is, 25% more, than a PCIe 1x 1.0 connection can handle. Under ideal circumstances.

Plus your math is way off. A single Thunderbolt controller can provide 10 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth. A PCIe 1.0 x1 connection provides 250 MB/s (i.e. 2 Gbps) which is 1/5 of what you get from Thunderbolt. Or put another way, Thunderbolt can currently provide the equivalent of a PCIe 2.0 x2.5 connection.

DerPuppy is correct. If driver support with PCIe compression for Thunderbolt connected GPU's was available, we could achieve better than 80% of the real-world performance of a PCIe 3.0 x16 connected GPU with an external solution.

Yes, more bandwidth is needed to support external high end GPUs, not to mention the simultaneous use of multiple external PCIe devices. This is why the initial Intel project was named Light Peak. Intel Labs silicon photonics researchers never intended the interface to use an electronic PHY. I believe the electronic PHY version (Thunderbolt) was due to Apple's collaboration along with Intel hitting snags in the development of an on-chip optical PHY.. Ultimately, there will be an optical PHY, since the ability to scale the electronic PHY is limited.Reply

This is a persistent misconception regarding Thunderbolt—that it would somehow be able to offer greater bandwidth if it had only used optical media.

Light Peak was developed from the outset with a target link rate of 10 Gbps (and using conventional fiber optic technology, not silicon photonics.) While optical cables have much less of a problem with signal attenuation than copper, which makes them more efficient for longer runs, when it comes to distances of less than 10 ft, which are the norm for typical PC use cases, copper is currently much cheaper, more power efficient, and user friendly.

Look around any data center and you'll most likely see lots of direct attach twinax copper for short runs. The highest bandwidth optical interconnects I'm aware of are rated for 56 Gbps (4x 14 Gbps lanes, full-duplex), but you can buy 3.0 m passive copper cables that can do that as well and cost way less.

Since you'd need a PCIe 3.0 x8 connection to fill the largest pipes we currently have at our disposal, I don't think copper's ability to scale is a real issue yet.Reply

I stand corrected. For some reason I was thinking the bandwidth provided for each PCIe lane was half of what is indicated in the charts you provided a link to.

Sorry about that - everyone.

I do not think anyone here would like to see this come into fruition more than myself. Having been let down by the industry many times in the past however. I just do not think it will ever happen. So I suppose I tend to get worked up over it.Reply

What I really want to see is 300W capable external cases for GPUs that support thunderbolt. Then we can have laptops that can be connected to modern high end GPUs that can game well when connected up. It also really needs to be able to drive the laptops screen.Reply

For home computers ps2 and vga don't make sense anymore, but for businesses (especially data centers) ps2 and vga are critical. USB + DVI KVM switches for more than 4 computers get *very* expensive, while 16-32 port ps2+vga KVMs are rather inexpensive and rock solid reliable. Reply

They could've included a DVI-I port and included a dongle, as some said. It's possible that the cost of utilizing the space freed up was too much; or there was a lack of suitable ports besides serial that are available to use that space.Reply

Question regarding requiring reboot upon adding thunderbolt devices. people have been adding external pcie devices via expresscard etc. (see: http://forum.notebookreview.com/e-gpu-external-gra... for forever. supposedly you can reconnect a disconnected egpu just by sleeping-> plugging-> waking a PC...would that work for thunderbolt?Reply

It's good to see more Thunderbolt options showing up in the PC market, but it seems to me that a full-sized ATX motherboard that already has 7 PCIe slots is about the last place anyone would need TB.

Totally unrelated topic: Is it just me or does anyone else find this whole "Military Grade" thing that has been showing up on motherboards lately to be one of the most embarassingly cheesy marketing gimmicks ever?Reply

Military/defense grade is a real thing when dealing with component rating, though. It makes absolutely zero difference (besides the cost) on consumer-grade stuff, but it is a different set of specifications.Reply

Well if there were real 'military grade' they would cost $5000 each as you'd have £4900 worth of 'recertification costs' over the standard OEM issue the defence contractor buys in and then stamps 'military grade'.Reply

This review was really unfair in my opinion. This is one of the first reviews of a non-Apple usage of Thunderbolt, and we don't even try Linux on it? You spent pages reiterating over and over and over about how Windows doesn't support hot plugging of those devices.

And you didn't see what Ubuntu (or Fedora, or whatever else) did when hotplugging? Come on.

Sincerely,slightly frustrated at the complete absence of Linux on Anandtech.Reply

Yeah, this is one of the problems with Thunderbolt that doesn't get a lot of coverage, though kudos to Anand for touching on it in this article.

The problem I'm referring to is that TB just pushes the driver availability problem out to the external device, which is particularly problematic for storage devices. Want to take that nice TB external drive and move it between OSX, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc? Well, now you not only have to make sure all those machines have a TB port and a compatible filesystem, you also have to make sure they all have a driver for whatever controller chip the enclosure has in it. With USB, eSATA, SAS etc, each of those machines can just have whatever controller works best for that OS.Reply

One thing: Windows support hotplugging(it doesn't care what type of device it is in general), but drivers have to support it too and if they don't provide proper callbacks to I/O manager then hotplug cannot work as IOM has no way to inform driver about changes.Reply

The security issues have nothing to do with 3rd party support. Pcie in every other instance was an internal device, now via TB, someone can develop a piece of hardware that has nefarious firmware and gain system level access - without opening up the computer.Reply

I must say I disagree to this to a large extent even though I would agree if we add: Physical access without anyone else present.

It is something entirely different to require someone to force power offs, use screw drivers, or do some other highly unusual things to a machine than simply plug it to a display or NAS or something with two tb connectors and hack it from the machine connected on the other side. That or a device with chained TB connectors i.e. projector sharing the connection with a Trojan device.

Expect to see something like this on a security conference soon... "We tested this projector on all the presenters machines and..."Reply

And why again would I pay top dollars (for the mother board, the peripheral and the cables to connect those) to put the storage outside of my full size desktop? I don't see the use case.

If it would be a nice small form factor running silently and still is expandable through thunderbolt, that would make sense.

Or if I can access the storage and the display in my desktop through thunderbold from my laptop (and auto backup/sync/drop box) that would make sense as well. The standby desktop becoming the hub, sounds feasible to me as the interface is symmetrical.

By the way w/o hot plugging this is broken. As you report those issue on Mac OS X as well, I'll go and wait until this becomes stable.Reply

Given the ability to daisy chain up to six devices, this could represent an awful lot of storage capacity.

From the manufacturer's standpoint, I think it makes a lot of sense for MSI to use ATX for their 1st motherboard with TB.ATX has lot more real estate to work with when deciding how to design the motherboard.

It's also their flagship Z77 motherboard, with all the bells-and-whistles.At the price point of their flagship board, it helps recoup R&D costs.

Given the scarcity of TB devices at this point in time, I doubt anyone wants to dive in.I expect more of a "sticking-my-toes-in-the-water approach from board makers.

Once there are more devices made to utilize TB, I think you'll see a more widespread adoption of TB.

As others have pointed out, TB has a better fit in the mobile market at this point.Reply

How about if you were building a box for video production and wanted to use one of the Thunderbolt interfaces available from AJA, BlackMagic or Matrox?

Although many of the Thunderbolt products that came to market in the past year were storage devices, Thunderbolt really isn't about external storage except for corner cases. You don't look at your USB ports and think that they're just there as a way to attach external disk drives, do you?Reply

I still don't understand why they needed to merge PCIe and DisplayPort, at least the way they did. If they kept everything separate, that's WAY less thunderbolt controllers everyone has to buy. If they really needed to combine with a video connector, couldn't they have just added some pins to DisplayPort or made a new connector that has both DisplayPort pins and PCIe pins? That way you could also have devices that only need the PCIe part of it without the video.

Just seems like a scheme by Intel and Apple to sell unnecessary chips.Reply

Mini DisplayPort connectors already pack 20 pins in a 33 mm^2 cross section. That's pretty dense, there's not really room for adding more pins. Plus, by keeping the same physical connector as mini-DP, it's easier to maintain backwards compatibility with existing DisplayPort gear. Besides, more pins in the connector generally means more conductors in the cable, and Thunderbolt cables are already complex and expensive enough as is.

Apple was already building Macs with this tiny little mini-DP connector that worked quite well for the form-factors they were designing, and it was capable of pushing 17.28 Gbps worth of packetized data over a single cable. Someone probably looked at that and said, "Wait a minute, why just use this for display data? Why not make it full-duplex and use it for transporting PCIe packets as well?"

As it is, you can plug DisplayPort gear into most Thunderbolt ports and just use it as if it was connected to a regular mini-DP port. Also, Intel is supposedly now shipping a much cheaper, single-channel, PCIe only variant of the Thunderbolt controller called "Port Ridge".Reply

From the picture, I saw Thunderbolt cable being plugged into on board TB port (which fully make sense of course). But what does it mean? Which GPU used to control the TB display?

Intel HD 4000? Or regular PCI-E GPU? If it's the latter, it means the port on GPU card become obsolete? And can we still use HDMI to be used as secondary display?

It kinda confuse me about how we use Thunderbolt on a regular tower, iMac and Macbook are integrated system so things become simple. But desktop and next gen MacPro (if it ever be updated) bring another problem since you can use PCI-E GPU which has its own display ports.

Did you read the second page?Ivybridge chipsets utilize Virtu software to allow you to switch between the IGP and a discrete GPU without having to physically switch the display connections.The display can be attached to either the motherboard connection or the dGPU connection and Virtu will allow you to use use the dGPU for gaming, while utilizing the IGP for less strenous uses.

As Anand clearly stated, you can use the TB connection for your display and that process still works properly.Reply

I couldn't quite grab it from the article, Was it possible to play games from gtx 680 on mac display through TB port? Or was another normal display used to connect to graphics card? And how in the hell are we supposed to run gpu intensive apps through HD 4000 only?? (Assuming we use mac display as only display?)Reply

The only difference between this and a non-TB motherboard is that you have yet another connection that can be used for your display.Nothing else changes with regard to how the IGP and dGPU work on an Ivy Bridge board.Reply

If there's one market besides mobile where ThunderBolt could really take off, it's in the corporate world.

Just think how inexpensive it could be if someone like Dell or HP were to take the following approach:

You put out a line of computers and monitors where all the connectivity is at the display.There would no longer be any need to build network, USB, Firewire or even sound into the motherboard.This reduces the computer itself to nothing more than the CPU, memory, GPU and storage.Even the storage could be separately housed.

That makes for a tiny foot print and your customers can now upgrade their computers to the latest-and-greatest CPU/GPU with no more effort than it takes to plug in the TB cable and the power cord.

This is also applicable to the HTPC community if someone ends up marketing TB-equipped TV's.Reply

Making the monitor the interconnect hub for a computer does make sense. You're more likely to move around a computer than a monitor. Portability doesn't just refer to laptops and using your computer away-from-a-desk. Portability for me means moving a computer from one desk to another. This is especially applicable at my place of work, where I have technical requirements that exceed the capabilities of a laptop, but where I need to move between offices which have a hotdesks with monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Basically, all of the logic should reside in the computer, but the monitor should act as the consolidation point for all the copper connecting your devices to your computer. I wouldn't like to see the monitor have any intelligence, with thunbderbolt (the carrier) being the exception.Reply

TB displays are great for laptop users but they're not a prefect solution for everyone... Any power user that has multiple displays probably doesn't care a whole lot for having a bunch of peripheral connections hanging off displays that are possibly wall or arm mounted. The holy grail for TB is still being able to offer that powerful external GPU that makes a thin and light laptop a gaming machine at home imo, but we seem to be a long way off from that.Reply

It should be possible to power on a computer from a Thunderbolt port, as was previously possible with Macs using a device like the i-Cue for USBhttp://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-boot-dongle-i-cue-for-m...or the former ADB Apple keyboards that also allowed powering on the Mac from them. That is really convenient when the computer is away and difficult to reach, below the table, etc.Reply

This is a very vanilla looking board for around $200. And the PCI-express lanes are pathetic. They choose to implement Thunderbolt on a motherboard with how many lanes??

I like msi so I really don't understand this. And for some reason, Intel motherboards in general don't provide enough PCIx lanes. As features are added, it seems like they limit the lanes even more. What gives?

In my opinion, someone would have to be pretty desperate to have Thunderbolt in their system if this board is representative of most implementations. Sure, its a new technology but this is indicative of a larger problem-Intel had the same problem with their implementation of USB 3.0; not enough PCI express lanes. A person would be foolish to use this board with crossfire or sli.Reply

Ivy Bridge LGA 1155 CPU's provide 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for dGPU use, which is pretty much twice the bandwidth that came with Sandy Bridge and plenty for most setups.

The PCH continues to offer 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes for additional features, which is about all that is reasonable given the 20 Gbps limit of the DMI 2.0 connection to the CPU. The more features a motherboard manufacturer adds, the more of these lanes they consume, and the fewer that are left available to the end user as open PCIe slots. By my count, MSI have used 6 of the 8 lanes branching off of the PCH by adding Thunderbolt, FireWire and an additional SATA 6 Gbps controller.

If you really think 16 GB/s of bandwidth isn't enough for your particular CrossFire or SLI setup, you can always go with an LGA 2011 solution which would give you 40. The bottom line is that if you want more PCIe lanes, you need a bigger socket with a lot more pins to provide those connections, and that ain't cheap.Reply

It's odd that the article states multiple times that Thunderbolt does not need any drivers for the OS to take advantage of it, yet the update from Intel states once Windows gets updated Thunderbolt drivers things will improve.Reply

The comments about drivers from Intel revolve around extending hot-swap capability to TB-connected devices.Much like hot-swap AHCI is supported in Windows 7 while not in XP, the basic functionality for the connectivity in W7 is due to TB connections being seen as a PCIe device or a DP device in W7, while the hot-swap functionality has to be achieved through drivers.I suspect Windows 8 might have said capability built in.I doubt MS is interested in doing the same for W7, since they want us all to move forward on their 'enlightened' Metro path.Reply

To clarify, the Thunderbolt controller does not require any drivers, but the devices you connect via Thunderbolt may.Thunderbolt devices tend to include PCIe hardware for which Windows drivers already exist, but the drivers were not designed with hot-plugging in mind. Once the drivers are tweaked to support hot-plugging, the devices won't require a restart in order to be recognized by the system, and will become eligible for Thunderbolt certification for Windows.It's the drivers for the PCIe connected hardware in the Thunderbolt devices that need updating in order to work properly in the new Thunderbolt context.Reply

Check the "1.2Opt-Int" videos (scroll down) that means "x1 PCI 2.0 + Optimus Compression on internal screen". The results are IMHO quite enjoyable with a GTX560. With Thunderbolt can only be better (and easier to be implemented). Currently the performance are about 75-80% of the x16 counterpart (obviously depending on the specific game).Reply

Overprovisioning is usually not a problem. What you have here is oversubscription, which definitely can be. The only chips on this motherboard that seem to be using the 8 PCIe lanes off of the PCH are the FireWire and SATA controllers, which use one apiece, and the Thunderbolt controller, which seems to be a 4 channel Cactus Ridge chip which uses four lanes. The audio chip does not connect to the PCH via PCIe, nor does the PHY chip for the Intel NIC, as far as I know. If they had just gone with 2 less PCIe x1 slots, they wouldn't have had any contention issues.

It's odd that MSI would use a 4 channel Thunderbolt controller and only provide a single Thunderbolt port. The PCIe throughput figures definitely point to this being the 4 channel version though. If it can drive 2 Thunderbolt displays, then it definitely is, and I'm guessing that the reason why only two of the display outputs work at the same time is because 2 of the 3 video signals from the IGP are going to the Thunderbolt controller.Reply

could you get as high framerate when playing game through thunderbolt with the Lucid's Virtu GPU virtualization and an external GPU as you would when connecting directly to the external GPU? I don't fully understand how it works. Reply

Pretty much, you lose a few percentage points going through the iGPU frame buffer. The way it works is that the GTX680 (or any dGPU) renders the frame and has it in its frame buffer. The Virtu software then copies said frame buffer over to the iGPU frame buffer and that iGPU has a direct connection to TB/HDMI/VGA off the mainboard. The act of copying the frame buffers has some overhead, but performance in the last review I saw of it was 97% to 100%.Reply

I may add, that while using a Pegasus R12 in a small render/graphics office Mac network (MBP, iMac and a recently added Hckintosh ;), now the limit for me on accessing that Pegasus is the Gbit Network itself.

Since fibre channel is far out of reach for a small business, next accompanying development necessary for TB use would be more 10GBit network PCIe cards and 10Gbit ExpressCard available for prosumers. 1 GBit is a bottleneck, once you use TB devices.

How did you folks get the iMac to work as a target display? I built a rig last night with the same motherboard. I tried to use my 21.5" iMac (mid-2011 with Thunderbolt) as a target display and couldn't get it to work. Please advise. Much appreciated. Reply